Frederika Randall

Dispatriata

Editor’s Note: In 1985, at the age of 37, Frederika Randall left the US for Italy, where she spent nearly all of the rest of her life. Her handle on Twitter was @dispatriata, and the following excerpt from My Dive, a memoir she completed shortly before her death on May 12 of this year, explores what the term meant to her and how she came to apply it to herself. The title of her memoir refers to an incident in late 2002 when she jumped from a third-story balcony in Rome, suffering catastrophic injuries. No longer physically able to work as a journalist, she transformed herself, over the final decade and a half of her life, into one of our finest literary translators. (See arkint.org for tributes to her from Giacomo Sartori, Ann Goldstein, Jhumpa Lahiri, Tim Parks, Ilan Stavans, and others.)

Edonismo Reaganiano was only one of the things that drove you away from the USA. There was also the matter of being white, Anglo-Saxon, and nominally Protestant. And that was not an identity you could embrace wholeheartedly. Wop, that was better. Although for the Wops you would always be a Wasp, and you would always be un’americana. A gringa. Even when you became a citizen of Italy in 1999 you couldn’t cast off that Yank/Wasp identity. You had to answer for the privileges that came with being, as someone once said on your first day on a Mediterranean beach, “white like a mozzarella.”

You did try to slip out of your old skin, God knows. Italy felt like an interesting country to be part of, without getting too patriotic about it. And above all it was different from the one you’d grown up in, and learning how to be an Italian would be a kind of dispatrio. 

Dispatrio was the term used by the writer Luigi Meneghello when, twenty-four years old, he left Italy just after the war and went to Reading, England, where he lived and taught until his retirement. Dispatriation, as opposed to expatriation: it meant a deliberate, sometimes painful, distancing of himself from the Italian culture he had grown up with, learning a new grammar of being. Born in 1922—the year of the March on Rome, as he liked to point out—young Meneghello had grown up a product of the Fascist mentality he absorbed in school and from his beloved uncles, Mussolini enthusiasts of the first hour. In 1943, however, being an intelligent young man, he had joined the Resistance. 

In Britain, he met a “strikingly different cultural system” in the way people reasoned and behaved, the things they took for granted. Absorbing that “was like beginning life again, with some of the vividness we have in childhood.” In his first years in Britain, every new thing seemed “absurdly vivid and significant.” Meneghello let you see migrating to Italy as an opportunity to remake your childhood, learn to question all that goes unquestioned, adopt another perspective. To keep your distance from patriotic and expatriate notions that come naturally to an American. We’re exceptional, we’re the tops. The rest of the world should think like us! 

And so you would try to see yourself as these Italians saw you. The generous view is that Americans are some of the world’s most ignorant people. While others are adept at moving back and forth between languages and cultures, Americans know only their own limited experience. Their language, world dominant, is their measure of reality. They are ignorant, and arrogant to boot. Foolish. 

A less-forgiving judgment: Americans are criminals, and if not actively, we are complicit with criminals. Criminals who meddle in the affairs of others, stir up tensions, start wars. Criminals who have the highest opinion of themselves and their motives and are convinced of their deep righteousness. Their goodness. Italy might be plagued with corruption and bad faith, but it was not in a position to do that kind of harm. And above all, there was less hypocrisy, and more cynicism, if you like. Italians didn’t believe they were virtuous. They had a healthy tendency to be self-critical. Even too much so. That appealed to you, maybe even too much so. 

*

It wasn’t enough that you were an American, there was the further disgrace that you had been one for a long time. Your grandparents hadn’t come from a hardscrabble southern Italian village; they had set down in the US many years ago from England, Scotland, and Protestant Ireland. Had some of them had survived and prospered by exploiting dark and native others? A part of the paternal side in New England had been Americans since the 17th century. And then there were the southern kin.

Online, at one of those ancestry websites, you found a written history of the Watson family, Daddy’s mother Lydia’s line. The American founder was James, born in Scotland, arrived in Maryland “before 1740” along with his brothers. James married the sister of a Revolutionary War general. His son, also James, was “a planter and slave owner, a noted Indian fighter and a member of the Church of England,” said the wretched document. 

There he was, the primal family villain. A slaver and a slaughterer of native Americans—and to add insult to injury, a church-going man. 

You began racing through the subsequent generations. The third Watson in the line, Thomas, was described as a “civil engineer and county surveyor.” Born in Maryland, he died in what was then western Virginia. Like the family of his wife Rebecca, Thomas was born into the planter class but moved westward, a land surveyor alongside the soldiers and sheriffs wresting control of the territory from indigenous Americans, “civilizing” after the last Shawnee were removed around 1815. By the time his son James Otis was born, Watson, instead of tobacco and slaves, saw his future in land claims and raw materials. 

In 1852, the family had acquired fourteen acres of coal land in northwestern Virginia. (In 1863, during the Civil War, that part of the state would be annexed to the Union as West Virginia.) That year the B&O railroad was building tracks through northern West Virginia, heading west to Ohio. The Watsons’ coal properties were right on the rail line, excellent for shipping. James Otis Watson founded the first mining business of the upper Monongahela Valley. By the turn of the 20th century he was rich. 

It wasn’t hard to make money in the coal fields of West Virginia. The Pittsburgh seam— high-quality bituminous coal, good for making coke—runs south from Pennsylvania right through West Virginia. It is one of the deepest and richest lodes of coal ever known to geologists. In the early 20th century there were a hundred millionaires in that otherwise small, poor state. James Otis, asked the secret of his success, boasted of his parsimony, his flexibility, his distaste for bureaucracy. Other, larger coal companies in the East had big offices, “a salaried president, secretaries, clerks, and a mule boss and mine boss. I am my own president, my own secretary, and my own mule boss and mine boss, and I carry my office in my hat.” 

But that wasn’t all. He sought out the cheapest labor, workers who hesitated to insist on their rights. And he didn’t spend his hard-earned profits on mine safety, in one of the most dangerous businesses then and now. You read somewhere that he would have preferred to hire ex-slaves, who were considered hard workers and unlikely to organize, but he worried there would be racial tensions if he brought African Americans into the county. And so by the turn of the century the company labor force was made up mostly of newly arrived Italian and Polish immigrants, the lowest-paid and least-protected non-African-American workers around. In the competition with nearby Pennsylvania coal producers, Watson’s strategy was low wages and fierce opposition to all efforts to unionize. When his own workers struck, he simply fired them all and hired scabs.

 Child labor was also part of his formula, you learned with growing unease. Children as young as six or seven went down in the mines as unpaid assistants to their fathers or older brothers. When the company provided a school for miners’ children, few boys over age eight ever attended; by that age they were old enough to work. The children were treated as invisible; nobody counted them when the men were logged in for their shifts. If there was an accident, a child who died was unlikely to be recorded anywhere. 

*

And there had been an accident. Of course there had been. One morning in Rome, in late 2007, you stumbled upon a long newspaper article about a horrendous disaster at the Monongah mines of northern West Virginia. The Italian Foreign Ministry had recently held a commemorative service there and later they published a handsome, thick volume of historical essays, photographs, and documents. The Foreign Ministry was famously staffed with people counting up their quarters of nobility, but they paid honest tribute to the hundreds of impoverished, exploited miners who met their death at Monongah. 

The University of West Virginia Press would also publish a meticulous and damning investigation of the Monongah disaster, written by an official of the U.S. Department of Labor. But there was scarcely a peep out of any other American authorities. And yet this was the gravest mine accident—maybe the worst industrial accident ever—in the history of the United States. The number of dead was finally put at 362, but the real count was almost certainly much higher—probably as many as 500–550 died at Monongah—including children working off the books and bodies never recovered. 

The owner of the mines in question, you read in your Italian newspaper that December day in Rome, was the Fairmont Coal Company. Never heard of it. But Fairmont, yes, that was the town Daddy’s family came from. A quick web search revealed what you had not even dared to think: the proprietors of the fatal mine were two brothers and a cousin all named Watson, the sons of James Otis. The owners and top executives were Daddy’s great uncles. His own grandfather held the position of treasurer in the company.

So it was them. Or rather, it was you. This was the repressed family crime that must have clouded your father’s life, left him angry, morose, and susceptible to drink. It had clouded your life too. 

A secret, buried and toxic for generations.

*

More Italians worked (and died) in the mines than any other ethnic group. Most had come to Fairmont at the turn of the 20th century, lured by company recruiters from West Virginia who travelled to southern Italy’s struggling provincial towns, offering work in lamerica. The men were taken aboard ships bound for Maryland. Sometimes they sailed as indentured laborers, owing many months of work for their passage. Most had been hired specifically to break strikes and were shunned and despised by their American-born peers. Italians were almost always the lowest of the low among immigrant laborers in the US. They earned very poor wages and worked in dangerous industries, building urban subways and mining coal. In any case, there were very few protections for workers of any sort at a time when industrial accidents in the US totaled a horrifying one million annually.

Fairmont was a fiercely controlled company town. The company owned the railway and trolley lines and the property that housed the post office and the telegraph. The town government held its meetings on company property. Fairmont Coal hired guards who kept a sharp eye out for union organizers. The Italians joked that they were treated like royalty in America: everywhere they went they were guarded by men with rifles. The union organizers came anyway: both Samuel Gompers and Eugene Debs visited this corner of the state before the turn of the century. 

In 1902 when Mother Jones came to town to organize for the United Mine Workers of America, she held her rally in a neighboring county because a judge friendly to the company had issued an injunction banning demonstrations. The sheriff duly followed Mother Jones and her men across the county line and arrested her even before she was inside his jurisdiction. Mother Jones would do better “to follow the lines and paths that the All-Wise Being intended her sex should pursue,” friendly Judge Jackson had opined when ordering the injunction, his heart warmed by the railway car full of coal that the company delivered to him every Christmas. 

*

The Watsons were not kind to their workers, alive or deceased. The day after the accident Clarence Watson told the New York Times that the explosion might have been caused by an open lamp—that is, by miner negligence. Another company official hazarded, purely hypothetically, that little boys playing with blasting powder underground could have set off the explosion. “Sometimes I feel the poor miner has not a ghost of a show for his life when he enters the mine,” a man from the federal government said. There had been many mine explosions in the region that year and the deeper (older) the mines were, the more men died. Not all these accidents could be due to miner carelessness, he said.           

The grand jury—made up of prominent men who were almost all friends of the Watsons—concluded that the cause of the explosion was “powder ignited in shaft number 8,” asserted that the levels of methane gas and coal dust had not exceeded safety levels, and that Fairmont Coal had complied with state mining laws. The deaths were not the company’s fault. None of the surviving families was eligible for compensation. 

Fairmont Coal did finally make some payments, but not before the Italian consul prodded them for several years. The checks came with a statement each recipient had to sign, saying that the money was “a gratuity to which you have no legal right or claim” and offering some patronizing advice to the widows: “deposit the money in a strong bank at interest and use as little from month to month as you can get along with.”

So the official version was that your people weren’t responsible. Fairmont Coal had taken all the measures necessary to protect the men. It was an Act of God. 

Or maybe of little boys. 

*

That whitewash stung your conscience, and even more so when you read some of the petitions filed by the families of the dead. An estimated one thousand widows and children survived miners killed at Monongah, and their situation was often desperate. One family was awarded a death benefit of nineteen dollars per child for three orphan brothers. A total of fifty-seven dollars in a one-time payment. When another woman petitioned for assistance as the closest surviving relative of her dead brother, company executives, armed with information certainly supplied by their goons, sent letters disputing her modest claim. She lived in a “shanty” (presumably company-built housing), they wrote, where she kept house for a cousin and several other men besides her brother. She’d been cooking and cleaning for the cousin even before her brother arrived. A woman keeping house for so many men was very likely a woman of loose morals, the company implied. 

Honestly? It came as a great relief to finally learn of the Watson mine disaster. Perhaps it explained the feeling of ancestral guilt you’d dimly sensed clouding your entire life. It must be this that poisoned Daddy’s memories of family, and yours too. It certainly confirmed your intuition that a genealogy search was a very dangerous business. When a nation is founded on driving out indigenous peoples and enslaved labor, any white family that’s been around for centuries should worry about finding some terrible skeletons in the closet. 

*

After your fall, when you were no longer able to travel around easily on your own as a reporter, you unexpectedly found a new purpose as a literary translator. Novels, stories, history: you discovered this was your chance to act out different Italian voices. A man of the Risorgimento, a child raised under the rule of fascism and the Church, a tormented communist true believer, a priest blessed with stigmata, even the Almighty himself, with an Italian accent. It was a way to sink into your adoptive country’s texture and its past, to indulge a love of language and the music of Italian sentences. Not to mention the many fascinating things you could learn from translating a novel about a 19th-century Venetian patriot, a 20th-century farm organizer, or a solitary writer who discovers he’s the last man left on Earth. You immersed yourself in the dialect of the province of Vicenza, the battle of Monte Cassino, artificial intelligence, Primo Levi and the Resistance, the liberation of Italy from foreign rulers and local potentates, fanciful astrophysics, Il Duce, the contemporary saint Padre Pio. What began as a pastime, an amusement, became a real vocation, something journalism had never been.

You sat at your desk and ran your fingers lightly over the wood like a spiritualist testing her Ouija board. You were trying to get in touch with twenty-six-year-old Ippolito Nievo, author of Confessions of an Italian, a huge, sprawling, immensely entertaining 1858 novel about the founding of modern Italy. A clever, witty young fellow who’d had his share of disappointment in love, a man of high ideals who served as a soldier with Garibaldi and took part in his 1860 landing in Sicily to free the South from Bourbon rule. His lively 19th-century Italian was sauced with colloquial Venetian and old-fashioned sayings, and he made himself understood to you via his sense of humor. It was only by inviting him into the room and spending day after day in his company, that you were able to make him come to life in English.

After you’d been doing the job for a while you realized that unlike many another translator, you didn’t think of your role primarily or only as a literary operation. Other translators worked with words and sentences, exercising their alchemy on them to produce equivalent words in their own language and craft sentences reminiscent of the originals. But for you there was a different imperative, the same that you’d accepted when you had begun working as a reporter: to try to convey the other’s experience in his/her own terms, but—a further sleight of hand—in your own language. Your task was not to find the right words according to the dictionary, or the prettiest words, according to the standards of belles lettres. It was to find the words that would bring to life as much of the Italian writer’s own reality as possible in another language. Every text to be translated offered you an opportunity to convey to an Anglophone what it meant to be an Italian other. And that act of interpretation and impersonation was also immensely gratifying and freeing, for it delivered you from your monochrome identity of American and English speaker. It was another kind of dispatriation you could pursue.

Frederika Randall (1948–2020) was a writer, reporter, and translator. As a journalist she was, in the words of The Nation, an “acute chronicler of the postwar death spiral of Italian democracy.” As a translator, she tried to convey, in English, “as much of the Italian writer’s own reality as possible.” Her many translations include Ippolito Nievo’s monumental Confessions of an Italian, as well as works by Giacomo Sartori, Guido Morselli, and Sergio Luzzatto.